“In the summer of 1839, fifty-three Africans illegally sold in Havana mutinied on the schooner Amistad while being taken to Puerto Principe. The rebels, mostly men from the Mendi people of Sierra Leon, killed the captain and the cook but spared their masters to help steer toward the rising sun and Africa. For nearly two months, the would-be slaveowners rerouted by night until a navy brig captured the ship. …Authorities quickly threw the Africans in Connectiut jails while deciding either to return the men to their Spanish masters or award them as ‘salvage’ to the U.S. sailors.” (from the Preface)

Young takes on the voices of the Africans and imagines their thoughts, anger, and desire in four different sections. He starts with traditional poems, moves on to an imagined journal, then swerves into a libretto encompassing the whole group of Africans on Amistad, then ends with seven different monologues from a deathbed confession to a progress report, to a captain’s log. His language is lyrical and nimbly changes to fit the section and the speaker.

The poems in here cut to the heart of history and give you the immediacy of a primary source document with imagination and detail to take you even further into what it could have been like, as in the opening of “Broadway”:

At Broadway Tabernacle the abolitionists charge

half-dollar a head to view your Mendi zoo.

After the slideshow of Sierra Leone, they hold

spelling bees to show how far you’ve come.

I wish for a word I could become. If just one letter

would shift, worship turning warship . . . But little

Kale spells it right: –Bless-ed are the pure at heart.

The best part about the variety of Ardency is that you can pick a section and start there without reading the others, depending on your mood.